NEW SCARE CITY

It's a fictional streetscape we wander, here, a metropolis whose buildings, boulevards, and back alleys are in a constant state of flux. This is every place, and yet, no place at all - a city of dreams and a dream of a city.

Here, we explore the life and work of Ivan Illich and his circle of collaborators. There's no comprehensive index to the articles published, but we invite you to use the Search box, to the left, and to explore the Archive links that appear at the bottom of each page. Comments are welcomed.

Thursday, October 04, 2012

Recent Papers on Illich

We've just learned of some newly-published papers about Ivan Illich. We've not had a chance to read them, but we look forward to doing so. Until then, here's what we know:

In April, 2011, Western New England University's School of Law held an all-day symposium devoted to Ivan Illich. The title: Radical Nemesis: Re-envisioning Ivan Illich's Theories on Social Institutions.

Now, that school's law review has published a set of papers presented at the conference, as follows. All of these are available in PDF format for downloading at no charge:

THE PLACE OF LAW IN IVAN ILLICH’S VISION OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONBruce K. Miller

Meanwhile, a journal published by Wiley called Educational Theory has published this paper: "Ivan Illich's Late Critique of Deschooling Society: 'I Was Largely Barking Up the Wrong Tree'," by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar. The Wiley abstract states:

In this article, Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar examine Ivan Illich's own critique of Deschooling Society, and his subsequent revised critique of educational institutions and understanding of education, within the context of both his personal intellectual journey and the general epistemological shift that started to take shape in the early 1980s. Bruno-Jofré and Zaldívar consider how, over time, Illich refocused his quest on examining the roots (origin) of modern certitudes (such as those related to education) and explored how human beings are integrated into the systems generated by those “certainties.” Illich engaged himself in historical analysis rather than providing responses to specific contemporary problems, while maintaining an interest in the relation between the present and the past. Under the metaphors of the word, the page, and the screen, he identified three great mutations in Western social imaginaries and the reconstruction of the individual self. Bruno-Jofré and Zaldívar argue that while his written work, including Deschooling Society, generally had an apophatic character, his critique of education, particularly in the late 1980s and 1990s, is intertwined with his analysis of the parable of the Good Samaritan and his belief that modernity is an outcome of corrupted Christianity.